If you've ever been unfollowed on Twitter and wanted to know why, Qwitter is the Twitter service for you. Almost as elegant at Twitter itself, Qwitter simply asks you for your email address and twitter username, and then the service watches your Twitter follower list and sends you an email when one of your followers stops following you - including the last tweet you posted before they "qwit."

Although there are other services which track usage like this, Qwitter is, as of this writing, the only one that attempts to tell you why - although there's no guarantee that it was your latest tweet that broke the camel's back.

With pundits lining up on both sides of the Qwitter fence, one thing is certain - the proliferation of services like Qwitter shows that users and developers are continually seeking to build upon and expand Twitter's no-nonsense, pared-down interface - and that the much-buzzed Bay Area social network may have a lot to learn from its user base.

If you're anything like the rest of us, you probably (occasionally) maintain an oft-neglected Wordpress blog somewhere out there in the ether we know as the blogosphere. And if you're like the hipper of us, you may also already be using Twitter, the microblogging platform brought to you by the people who invented the word "blogger" in the first place.

The question is, how best to bring the two together - how to integrate your Wordpress or Drupal blog with your twitter account? Before you start loading plugins and modules into Wordpress willy-nilly, you should sit back and ask yourself, "What's my goal?"

If your goal is to drive traffic toward your blog through your twitter feed, you may want to use different software than, say, if your goal is to drive traffic toward your twitter profile through your blog. Or maybe you want the two to feed into each other - that's another piece of software right there.

If you want to drive traffic toward your twitter page, you probably want a nice sidebar widget that shows your most recent twitter updates. Try out Twitter Tools, a nifty little plugin by Alex King. It features a Wordpress sidebar widget that aggregates your most recent Tweets into a nice list, displayed with your blog's default sidebar list formatting. If you're a CSS wizard you can customize the appearance, otherwise you'll probably be happy with the default output (I was). You can choose how many recent Tweets to display, and there's a link to your Twitter page at the bottom of the widget.

Twitter Tools can also work to drive traffic from Twitter toward your blog with a feature that automatically posts Twitter updates whenever you post a new article on your blog. If you've got a lot of followers, and your blog's content tends to match your Tweet content, this option is perfect for you.

Or maybe you're more of a hands-off, invisible-hand-of-the-market kind of person; maybe you don't want to integrate your blog and twitter accounts directly, but instead want other people to be able to quickly and easily post your site into their own tweets. If that's the case, you'll want to try something more like Sociable, a social bookmarking plugin that lets you choose a set of sites to let users post your articles into. The output shows a nice, familiar set of icons that your users can click to add your post to their bookmarks:

Whatever method you choose, you'll want to stay on top of it. New Wordpress plugins are added to Wordpress' Plugins Directory daily, and before you know it, that plugin you loved so much last year may end up looking like a leftover Christmas tree in April. Keep them updated and never assume that you're using the one best suited to your purposes. With a little preparation, a little maintenance and a lot of blogging and tweeting, you'll increase your blog's traffic and visibility in no time - and get your Twitter profile a little more attention at the same time.

It seems like every new day brings with it a plethora of Web 2.0 clone and spin-off sites - from micro-blogging to photo-sharing. Specifically, the last year or so has seen an explosion in localized social networking sites - particularly sites with accessibility and relevance to non-English speaking countries. From German Twitter clones to Chinese Facebook knockoffs, the trend is toward language- and region-specific variants of popular social networking phenomenon.

All of these clones make me wonder about the effect that language has on determining whether or not a platform is globally accepted or not. For example, in April of this year, as soon as Twitter released their Japanese version of Twitter, Japanese quickly became the second most popular language on Twitter.

It begs the question - how much more popular would sites like Twitter be if they were available in a particular language BEFORE localized clones spring up?

From my perspective, if a localized clone is popping up somewhere, it represents a market that was not being served by the original product - or one that has improved on the original somewhat, which represents features that should be considered for implementation.

If that is the case, then the founders and designers of social networking sites should sit up and take note: if their sites aren't adequately localized (and that goes far beyond translation), potential users will seek a more relevant alternative - and since registrations for social networking sites show grow in a rolling snowball pattern, missing that initial mass of traffic can ultimately bring a Web 2.0 social network grinding to a halt, as it did with sites like Fo.rtuito.us.

Twiddeo is a new mashup of the Twitter API with the API of the video engine, V:social. The idea is that instead of telling people what you’re doing, now you’ll just be able to show them what’s going on in your life.

Twitternotes lets you take notes anywhere and send them into your twitter account. You can also tag notes too!

A set of Applescripts for updating iChat, Adium, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook simultaneously (or any combination thereof…)